European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - August 10, 1993, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Page the stars and stripes computers tuesday. August 10,1993 buying food saving Money made easy by Mona Breckenridge i the associated press Oklahoma City whether today s Consumers Are seeking to save time or Money even the menial task of grocery shopping is being trans ported into the High tech realm of computers. Hate those squeaky carts and Long checkout lines try shopping at Home on your personal computer. For those who find satisfaction in bargain Hunt ing there Are coupons customized according to shopping habits. Oklahoman Richard Harrison has designed computer software he says will help Busy professionals save pre Cious time by ordering groceries at Home on their pcs. Harrison s 2-year-old company minute makers is testing the system with a group of 55 people and an Iga supermarket in Northwest Oklahoma City. Test group members can choose from about 11,000 items on a computerized list. That s not the store s com plete inventory but with 10 kinds of Spaghetti sauce available nobody s complaining. With the touch of a few buttons shoppers can have bags filled with Gro Ceries delivered to their front doors at a time of their choosing. The mini mum order is $5, and a 10 percent charge is added. With a system set up and the bugs worked out Harrison said minute makers is looking to expand to other cities. The Field apparently is wide open. A previous bid by Prodigy services co., the National on line computer services network to set up a grocery shop at Home business failed because of Money woes. But pea pod inc. Of Evanston iii., is running a system Sim Ilar to Harrison s in the Chicago area that food business Magazine report Sis going Strong. Meanwhile another computerized shopping innovation expected to be introduced nationwide customized coupons is being tested at Snyder s food marts in Yukon okla. Credit verification corp., a Check verification company based in Abi Lene Texas has developed a computerized checkout system that records How often customers shop at a store and what they buy and then prints out specialized coupons. If a shopper consistently avoids the Deli Section for example the computer notices there Are no Deli items and prints out a Coupon for $2 off any Delicatessen Purchase. A customer who Only buys $10 Worth of groceries gets a Coupon offering special discounts on $40 Worth of purchases within the next two weeks. Anyone who makes a Purchase of $5 or More gets coupons that Are Good for free products discounts and gift certificates. We had developed a computer based system that could recognize and categorize customers said Steve grower a Csc vice president. We began to develop incentives depending on the kind of customer they  while the idea of a tracking device might sound like invasion of privacy Brower said it s strictly a numerical system and not invasive in any  customers Aren t identified by name phone number or address he said. He said customers Are More Likely to use the specialized coupons Given at stores than those in newspapers an circulars. Penny for your thoughts japanese scientists working to develop mind Reading units by David Thurber the associated press Yokosuka Japan forget key boards and  someday computers and other machines May be controlled directly by human thoughts. While other researchers struggle to develop computers that can understand human speech scientists Here Are trying to go a step further computers that can read your mind. Computers today Are very difficult Touse says Norio Fujimaki a researcher for Fujitsu corp. First you have to be Able to Type. It would be very Nice if you could just think about something and have the computer automatically do  no amount of deep thinking by the scientists makes this an imminent achieve ment however. Researcher Akira Hiraiwa says the goal will probably take years because of the difficulty of deciphering the brain s weak and Complex Waves. He works at a Laboratory in Yokosuka of the telecommunications giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone corp. Hiraiwa and Fujimaki Are studying electrical signals associated with thought Sand body motions. They Hope to develop ways of using those signals to control machines computers or otherwise. Hiraiwa has created a computer assisted robot hand that can mimic motions of a human hand by analysing the tiny nerve pulses sent by the brain to the Finger Muscles. The signals Are picked up by Coin sized sensors attached to the inside of a watch band and then sent to the computer which divides them into the messages in tended for each Finger and instructs the robotic fingers accordingly. It s difficult because the signals Are so needs Only a few minutes. Hiraiwa Hopes within a few years to develop marketable brain controlled artificial limbs that would be much easier to use than the cumbersome ones now Avail Able. The not researchers have decided to focus on deciphering nerve pulses sent from the brain to Muscles since they Are much stronger than the minute signals in Side the brain associated with thinking. Researchers at Fujitsu a computer an semiconductor maker have taken a Dif Ferent approach. They Are analysing cur rents the brain generates As people pre pare to speak. The currents though feeble Are stronger than those linked directly to  an array of 12 sensors attached to subjects Heads Fujimaki is measuring differences in electrical patterns inside the brain when the subjects mentally pre pare to say different sounds without actually moving their Mouths. . Weak and Are hard to detect and differentiate Hiraiwa says. In a recent demonstration Hiraiwa grasped a Ball in his fingers the watch band strapped to his wrist and the robotic hand clenched another Ball copying each Finger s motion. It initially took a supercomputer three hours to learn a person s nerve signal patterns Hiraiwa says. Now a much smaller computer with special processors mentally spoken sounds a and  Fujitsu officials say they Hope eventually to be Able to differentiate the electrical patterns for every different word which could make direct thought input from the brain into computers  goal is still a Long Way off. It s still unclear for example whether electrical patterns generated by mentally spoken words Are related to their sounds or Are some kind of symbolic representation of the concepts behind the words that would be common for All peo ple regardless of their  Able to differentiate so Many words would also require incredibly sensitive sensors and massive computer  la consider the project successful if within three years we can differentiate the brain signals for yes and no Fuji Maki  would at least allow you to turn your computer on and off. Dos 6 glitches can be minimized by Michael j. Himowitz the Baltimore Sun. Ever since i warned readers to be wary of upgrading to Microsoft s Dos 6, i be had Calls from users who be had problems with the latest version of the operating system. This does t mean everyone has had trouble. In my line of work i rarely hear from people who Don t have problems. Frankly i believe Microsoft s claims that Dos 6 is a reasonably stable product and that most users have no hassle at All. Dut if Microsoft Sells 5 million copies of Dos 6 and even 1 percent of its customers have some kind of problem that leaves 50,000 irate users out there. And most of them have a right to be angry particularly if they re paying Long Dis Tance charges to be put on hold by Micro soft s overworked technical support staff. After spending a couple of weeks talk ing to users Reading the literature and tuning in on Microsoft s on line support forums i be come to a couple of conclusions. First the main problems involve three of the most attractive reasons to upgrade to the new version disk compression disk caching and memory management. If All of these work Well on your system you la think $50 for Dos 6 is the Best Money you Ever spent. Second if those features Are attractive enough to persuade you to upgrade Todos 6, it is possible to minimize the risk. Unfortunately on a Small number of systems these features can backfire be cause of hardware incompatibilities an conflicts with some versions of existing software. You May experience lockups which Are annoying but curable with enough tinkering. Or you could wind up with a trashed hard disk which is a disaster. The problem is that there s no Way to Tell ahead of time if you re going to be one of the few unlucky souls. And if you re not knowledgeable about the Workings of Dos you la have a lot of trouble figuring out what went wrong. Even if you re a Dos expert you May Bein for a rough time. If you re running Dos 5 now with no problems and you have enough Dis space and memory to meet your needs you re probably Best off sticking with it. The new Utility programs that come with the Dos 6 bundle a disk de fragment or backup software and virus checker Are available from third parties Syman Tec s Norton utilities or Central Point s pc tools in much More robust forms. This is particularly True for 286 or older machines. While the double space disk compression in Dos 6 will increase your disk capacity it will slow these sys tems Down considerably. If you think the benefits of Dos 6 out weigh the Small risk involved Here s a couple of suggestions that will eliminate Many problems at the outset and make it easier to solve new ones As they crop up. Back up your hard disk first this is the single most important precaution you can take. Even if Dos 6 turns your hard disk into Mush you can always uninstall it and restore everything to its Pristine state. A full disk backup is Best. I recommend purchasing a tape backup unit whether or not you upgrade. These Aren t cheap $250 for an internal unit $450 for a stand alone drive that plugs into your Printer port but today s huge hard disk make backups to floppies so time con suming and unwieldy that few users Are willing to go to the trouble. Tape drives Are easy to use and pain less. They la do their work while you re asleep. If your livelihood depends on the data stored on your computer the prices Small. At the very least Back up your critical data files and All the directories con Taining your windows programs. These Are the hardest to reinstall and get work ing properly. Make sure your hard disk is in woodworking order. The Dos 6 double space compression program will give your disk the workout of its life when you install it and flaws you May not have noticed May become painfully obvious. Run the Chi ask program that comes with your existing version of do Sand fix any problems it finds with your files. Better yet buy the latest version of the Norton utilities or pc tools $100 to $150 on the Street and use their disk fix ing programs to run a thorough surface test of the disk and repair any bad spots. If you have earlier versions of these pro Grams upgrade to the newest releases. If you Don t want to make that invest ment consider purchasing the $99 ver Sion of Dos 6 that comes packaged with the Norton desktop for windows. It s Only $50 More than straight Dos and includes the latest version of the Norton disk doctor along with a Bunch of other useful utilities